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The Crazy, Ingenious Plan to Bring Hippopotamus Ranching to America

Image: Mark Summers

In the early years of the last century, the U.S. Congress considered a bold and ingenious plan that would simultaneously solve two pressing problems — a national meat shortage and a growing ecological crisis. The plan was this: hippopotamus ranching.

Hippos imported from Africa and raised in the bayous of Louisiana, proponents argued, would provide a delicious new source of protein for a meat-hungry nation. In the process, the animals would gobble up the invasive water hyacinth that was killing fish and choking off waterways. It would be an epic win-win. A bill was introduced in Congress, and newspaper editorials extolled the culinary virtues of “lake cow bacon.”

This week in The Atavist, writer (and WIRED’s Mr. Know-It-All columnist) Jon Mooallem describes the hippo ranching scheme and the story of two fascinating men behind it: one a modest frontiersman and soldier of fortune, the other a self-aggrandizing con man. Both were spies. Each was sworn to kill the other. But the great cause of hippo ranching brought them together.

Mooallem spoke with WIRED about this odd episode in American history and the future that might have been. An excerpt follows.

WIRED: What was going on in America at the time that made hippopotamus ranching seem like a good idea?

Jon Mooallem: The dawn of hippopotamus ranching in America was 1910. There was a very serious meat shortage. These were peak years of immigration, cities were exploding, the meat industry was getting bigger and uglier but it could not keep up. America had always solved its problems by moving west, but now the frontier was closed. So it was a meat crisis, but it was also kind of an identity crisis.

WIRED: How were hippos supposed to fix it?

Mooallem: The idea was that you could harness land that wasn’t productive for grazing cattle, like swamps and bayous. So you’d transplant the hippos into these environments that aren’t totally unlike where they live in Africa. You could suck up all the energy in what looks like a wasteland and turn it into meat.

At the same time, there was a real problem with invasive water hyacinth plants; there still is in fact. So a Louisiana Congressman named Robert Broussard decided he could solve the water hyacinth problem by bringing in hippos to suck up the plants. You were literally taking one problem and using it to solve another problem.

Frederick Russell Burnham. Photo: Library of Congress

WIRED: Who else was involved in promoting this?

Mooallem: Well, Broussard has this Congressional hearing and he needs expert witnesses. The first is this geeky apple researcher. The other two are Frederick Russell Burnham and Fritz Duquesne.

Frederick Russell Burnham is this staggeringly impressive and totally forgotten figure from history. The Boy Scouts were founded in his image to create boys that were as capable and honorable as him. He was the inspiration for Indiana Jones. He was a freelance adventurer who’d up and gone to Africa to fight for the British colonialists, because like a lot of people at the time he thought this was a noble kind of project to bring “civilization” to Africa. He was once described as the “most complete human being who ever lived.”

Fritz Duquesne was a Boer, which are the descendants of Dutch settlers in Africa. He was a really slippery fellow. He moved through life in this cloud of aliases. He was a virtuosic and ambitious con man. He fought against the British in the second Boer war. Like Burnham he was a kind of free ranging spy. Burnham once called him the “human epitome of sin and deception.” During the Boer war the two men were assigned to kill each other.

WIRED: But somehow the hippo plan brought them together?

Mooallem: They had this real rivalry, but it’s one of those old fashioned rivalries where you honor your enemy. It seems they never met in battle. When they finally meet, it’s under the guise of being collaborators with Broussard on this hippo plan. Based on their experiences in Africa, they’re going to start what’s essentially a lobbying firm to drum up donations from rich people.

WIRED: Obviously this didn’t come to pass, and you go into what happened in your Atavist story. But you have to wonder… what if it had?

Mooallem: It’s an interesting thought experiment. I’ve never tasted hippo, but I’ve read many accounts that it’s delicious. So that problem is solved! But I don’t know how feasible it would have been or what unintended ecological consequences there might have been.

We didn’t get the hippos, but we’re not starving, so what happened to the meat crisis? What happened was the very beginnings of industrial agriculture. Rather than bring in new animals that could take advantage of landscapes that didn’t seem that productive, we basically engineered those landscapes into more pasture, and we packed more and more of the same kinds of animals onto that new land. You can basically trace a straight line from this moment in 1910 when another way — i.e. hippopotamuses — seemed possible to the solutions we have now, which are feed lots and confinement operations and all the attendant consequences and fallout.

One interesting thing about the hippo plan was that people were imagining that because hippos were so large you would not be able to ship them to the stockyards in Chicago like all the other animals. And I should say it wasn’t just hippos. There were also proposals for importing antelope and building ostrich farms. They were basically open to everything. But you’d end up with a constellation of local food systems. It’s a very Michael Pollan-esque idea where you’d have things grown and slaughtered locally, and a system that’s more diverse and resilient.

WIRED: What do you find most compelling about this story?

Jon Mooallem: I think it’s the idealism around this idea, that people were willing to raise these really bold solutions and attempt to think them through. I think there’s actually something beautiful about the idea that Congress would have a hearing on hippopotamus ranching. It was this moment when anything seemed possible.

Frederick Russell Burnham didn’t like public speaking, but he arrived at the Maryland Hotel, in Pasadena, California, on the night of September 19, 1910, determined to communicate a few clear and uncontroversial truths.

Burnham was 49 years old—a frontiersman and soldier of fortune who’d spent his life leaping into conflicts with American Indians and colonial wars in Africa. He looked bronzed and weather-beaten, like a living monument to those campaigns, and though small—he was only about five foot four—his presence was imposing. He was a compact strongbox of a man. One admirer would describe him as “emphatically a man’s man: able, active, alert.” The impression he gave was immediately one of “force and self-control.”

Burnham had risen to fame as a scout—an esteemed breed of solitary wayfinder and spy with no exact analog in contemporary warfare. Scouts slinked into enemy territory to gather intelligence or cut supply lines, or roamed the no man’s land around camp to keep watch. They were disciplined, self-sufficient, preternaturally competent. Their proficiency in the wilderness seemed almost supernatural at times, and Burnham, who’d earned the nickname King of Scouts, exemplified their character and prowess.

“He has trained himself to endure the most appalling fatigues, hunger, thirst, and wounds; has subdued the brain to infinite patience, has learned to force every nerve in his body to absolute obedience, to still even the beating of his heart,” wrote the journalist Richard Harding Davis. “He reads ‘the face of Nature’ as you read your morning paper.” Another writer described Burnham’s life as “an endless chain of impossible achievements.”

People who met Burnham tended to comment on the same disarming quality of his eyes. The novelist H. Rider Haggard called them “steady, grey blue eyes that have in them a far-away look such as those acquire whose occupation has caused them to watch continually at sea or on great plains.” They were eyes that absorbed every inch of the periphery, even as they bored deep into your own—eyes, one woman noted, “of startling keenness and brilliancy, eyes that see everything without seeming to see.” She remembered sitting with friends under a great sycamore tree in California while Burnham spun tales of a certain African siege. The scout paused at one point and said casually, “We’ll kill that snake when I finish the story.” No one else had noticed the rattlesnake that had slithered in silently behind them as he spoke.

He was “a man whose senses and abilities approached that of a wild predator,” one writer explained. He could go two and a half days without sleep. He could fix a pistol’s broken mainspring with a bit of buffalo bone. It was said he could smell water from afar, and very seldom drank alcohol and never smoked, for fear it would dull his senses. Commanding officers described him as half jackrabbit and half wolf, or as “a man totally without fear.” But ultimately, the most impressive thing about Burnham may have been his reticence to talk too much about his conspicuous impressiveness. (Years later he would prepare two versions of a prologue for his memoirs and label them “Boastful” and “Non-Boastful.” The “Boastful” version was hardly boastful, and the last paragraph of the “Non-Boastful” version began: “If mine seems a rather boastful recital, I shall apologize.”) One acquaintance would call him “the most complete human being who ever lived.”Burnham had come to the hotel in Pasadena to address the Humane Association of California at its second annual convention, a banquet hall full of do-gooders, dedicated to the prevention of cruelty to animals. The Humane Association had quickly become one of California’s most powerful civic organizations, and Burnham—now part of an eccentric brain trust that was getting its own innovative animal project off the ground—knew that the philanthropists in the room might be valuable allies. He didn’t necessarily respect them, though. Privately, he mocked humane societies as small-minded and sentimental—full of romantics who’d rush to save flies from murderous spiders. It was foolish, Burnham felt, to “fritter away our money and time on silly, emotional things as proposed by so-called animal lovers” at a time when America roiled with so many substantial opportunities and terrors.

Burnham was here at the Maryland Hotel to call these animal lovers to a higher purpose, to gather them behind an idea. It was a grand and sparkling idea, an idea with momentum. The idea was already making its way through the U.S. House of Representatives in the form of a bill, introduced by one of Burnham’s partners, the Louisiana congressman Robert Broussard. Theodore Roosevelt, a friend of Burnham’s, had been so impressed with the idea a few years earlier that, newspapers reported, he’d pledged “his hearty approval and promise of cooperation.” Days before the speech in Pasadena, Burnham had gone to Denver to meet with the former president and secured his endorsement all over again. The New York Times called the idea “practical and timely.” Editorials around the country claimed that the idea’s time had come, or that it couldn’t come soon enough.

The idea was to import hippopotamuses from Africa, set them in the swamplands along the Gulf Coast, and raise them for food. The idea was to turn America into a nation of hippo ranchers.